Philosophy
Phi Slama Jama played a frenetic, playground-influenced style of basketball that was in near diametric opposition to the fundamentally polished and methodical style espoused by basketball traditionalists like John Wooden. Wooden maligned dunking as flamboyant and unsportsmanlike and even forbade his players from performing the shot for several years. Guy Lewis not only condoned his players dunking, he "insisted on it," dunks being what he called "high-percentage shots."
The young players who made up Phi Slama Jama had been influenced by the freewheeling style of play pioneered during the 1970s by the defunct ABA and its most famous player, Julius Erving of the Virginia Squires. In this paradigm, athleticism took precedence over fundamental skills, fast breaks were preferred to set plays, and dunking trumped the jump shot. In an interview with Thomas Bonk, Clyde Drexler succinctly espoused the Phi Slama Jama philosophy, saying, "Sure, 15-footers are fine, but I like to dunk." The Phi Slama Jama teams were notably poor at free throw shooting, with some critics attributing their 1983 NCAA Final loss to this deficiency.
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Famous quotes containing the word philosophy:
“Mr. Alcott seems to have sat down for the winter. He has got Plato and other books to read. He is as large-featured and hospitable to traveling thoughts and thinkers as ever; but with the same Connecticut philosophy as ever, mingled with what is better. If he would only stand upright and toe the line!—though he were to put off several degrees of largeness, and put on a considerable degree of littleness. After all, I think we must call him particularly your man.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“And new Philosophy calls all in doubt,
The element of fire is quite put out;
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Can well direct him where to look for it.”
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“The philosopher believes that the value of his philosophy lies in its totality, in its structure: posterity discovers it in the stones with which he built and with which other structures are subsequently built that are frequently better—and so, in the fact that that structure can be demolished and yet still possess value as material.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)